


Karedevil

by fanwithoutfear



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-08-24 10:25:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16638155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanwithoutfear/pseuds/fanwithoutfear
Summary: What if Karen Page used her investigative skills to find the chemicals that gave Matt his abilities?





	1. More

**Author's Note:**

> I live on comments.

Karen and Matt are friends, just friends, for a long time, but something's bothering Matt. He never explained the whole Elektra thing. It's not that he needs Karen to think better of him, and it’s not that he wants her back. It's that he can't stand her believing someone would do that to her. He knows she's she's handling it, and she's even willing to let it slide, but he knows it hurt her, so he catches her on the way home one day and he explains what really happened, ninjas and all.

He stammers a lot and apologizes even more, and Karen doesn't know where to look or what to say. "It's not like we were really, um… I'm fine, really." It’s still painful for Matt to talk about Elektra. “You don’t have to explain,” Karen says.

"I do,” Matt insists. “You just shouldn't think that, that, that anyone would betray you like that.”

"It's sweet of you to think so, but I don’t know. People just aren’t always reliable.” Her mother died. Todd turned out as bad as everyone said. She thought her brother would always protect her, but he couldn't. She thought her father needed her, but in the end, he didn't. "Maybe I attract it.”   
  
Matt draws a deep breath and sighs. "It's not just you." His mother abandoned him to his father, his father abandoned him to die in a blaze of glory, and Stick abandoned him just as he opened up, then sent Electra to shipwreck his future. "You deserve better."   


"You too, Matt."   
  
And they go on being friends, just friends, for a long time. But something is bothering Karen. There isn't anybody like Matt. He's the only one: the only man who cares about justice like it's personal, who makes her feel innocent and safe and always has, who gets better and better the deeper she looks. She knows she can't hide her feelings from him, and she knows he hasn't made a move, but she knows he's the only Matt Murdock she'll ever meet, so she catches him on the way home one day, and she takes his hand and she whispers softly, _"Tell me you don't feel the same way."_   
  
But she's the only Karen Page he'll ever meet, the only one there is. There are so many women—strong, sharp, graceful, sweet women—but none of them are Karen. What can he say? He squeezes her hand. "I can't." He can't deny it. He lets her hand go. He can't be with her. "You deserve better." She deserves someone she won't always be worried for, someone who won't have to protect her because he won't put her in danger in the first place. She deserves someone whole, not someone split down the middle.   
  
She takes his hand again.  _"So do you."_


	2. Mice

He's right, of course. Karen can't stand watching him go, worrying about how hurt he'll be, when he'll come back, and whether he'll come back. She hates slipping needles through his skin almost as much as she hates leaving him to sew his own stitches. She hates knowing he's going to get himself killed one of these days. But she knows she's not leaving, and she knows he's not changing, and she doesn't even want him to, not truly. He wouldn't be Matt if he weren't Daredevil, any more than she would be Karen if she didn't try to set things right. It's what she does.

"I want to be here when you get back, Matt."   
  
"But you can't." Matt's knows how relieved she is when he gets back, and it tells him how worried she is when he's gone. He's thought so many times about giving it up again.   
  
"Not anymore. I can't stay here doing nothing while you're out there. I just... please call me. If you need me for anything, if you want to talk, if you just want me here, I'm only a call away. Don't hesitate. Don't even think about it. I want to be here for you."   
  
"I understand." He never expected her to wait up. She’s not leaving. On the contrary, she’s making their relationship more sustainable.

"Promise you'll call me. Often."   
  
And he does, because he knows she means it, because he wants her to be free, and because Karen has never abandoned him. He calls her after a long night of bashing people's faces in and getting nowhere closer to the truth. He just wants someone to talk to. She smells like... rats? Mice?

_ What key piece of information _ , Matt wonders,  _ have I missed? What don't I know about Karen that would explain keeping pet mice? Perhaps a pet snake?  _ He doesn’t ask, though. He knows she's holding something back, but he also knows it's not fair that he can always tell, and he thinks it's safe enough to leave her secret rodents be. He's doing everything he can think of to make sure it works.   
  
It's far too little, of course, but she takes it and somehow she makes it enough. A year goes by, and they're still holding on tight. The smell of mice has faded into the smell of Karen just like the smell of candles was a part of Father Lantom and the smell of Marci is a part of Foggy. Matt doesn't notice it again until it’s gone. "I set them free," Karen tells him. She doesn't need them anymore. She's experimenting on herself now.


	3. All or Nothing

The police report has the name of the driver, the names of the chemicals, and the name of the pharmaceutical company that was shipping them. All it's missing are the chemicals, and Karen is very resourceful.

She could go undercover and infiltrate the company herself if she didn't already have a day job at Nelson, Murdock, & Page. She could pitch the story to Ellison—nothing sells papers like dangerous chemicals that give you superpowers—but she can't have it on the front page. She could call in a favor, but not just anyone could pull this off. This is a job for Alias Investigations.   
  
Jones disagrees. "No. I'm a private investigator, not some kind of secret agent."   
  
"You know what you really are?" Karen asks.  _ "Bored _ . When's the last time a case actually challenged you? When's the last time you accomplished anything?"   
  
"I'm making a living here, lady, not running for employee of the month."   
  
"This is an opportunity t—"   
  
"Do I look like I care?"   
  
"You know what? Fine. If all you want to do with your life is shoot pictures of cheaters, that's fine.” Actually, that could work. “Find me a cheater at Mackenzie Labs and I'll get the chemicals myself."   
  
Blackmail, it turns out, is easier anyway. Jessica digs up some dirt, and within a week Karen has everything she could have hoped for and more.   
  
She burns through a lot of mice. It’s the only thing she has to distract her when Matt goes out, the only hope she has of making it work between them. What they have right now, as perfect as it is, can't last. She can't always feel so powerless. One day he's going to get in over his head, and she can't let that be the end. She has to be able to help.   
  
Besides killing the mice or making them sick, though, none of the chemicals seem to do anything. Karen can't even be sure if it's already worked and she just hasn't noticed the difference. She keeps trying, though, long after she's given up, because she can't sleep when Matt's out. She keeps trying until mouse R21 starts cowering in the corner, trying to claw its ears off.

It takes a solution of three different chemicals. She learns to administer them by injection so the mice aren't blinded. She tests higher doses on rats and guinea pigs, and tailors the perfect balance. After a few more months of testing, she feels like she’s tried everything she can. She rolls up her sleeve and picks out a vein.

It's been a long time since she's let a needle under her skin, and she wishes it didn't feel so familiar still. She starts with just a tenth of a mouse-sized dose. It shouldn't be enough to do anything, but she can’t help imagining she feels colder.

She waits a week, and nothing seems different. What if nothing ever happens? This project is the only thing keeping her sane when Matt is away. She tries a little more the next week, and a little more the week after that, until one night, Matt doesn't come back.


	4. Needle

Karen always says goodbye like it's the last time, and Matt hates that she could always be right. He's careful for her. He doesn't rush in like he used to. He's thinking about maybe carrying a knife, just in case. No, violence has already changed him enough. He's thinking about carrying a phone so Karen can track his location. No, it will only make her worry more, with the places he's going. He's thinking about stopping. Just not yet.   
  
There's still too much injustice in his city. The innocent suffer, and he can't turn a deaf ear to that. What he's doing is making a difference. There are so many people alive right now who wouldn't be, and so many more who would have been at their funerals, who would have been changed forever. There are so many criminals locked up, doing time instead of hurting people.   
  
It feels like it's working, like the old criminals are hiding or defeated, and fewer and fewer new criminals are popping up. They're still popping up, though, and bleeding in from the surrounding neighborhoods. There's a gang war stirring between the ODB and the AMG, and Hell's Kitchen is caught in the middle of it. There's something else too, something crouching in the echoes of Fisk's empire. Sometimes Matt tries to catch someone with aspirations of filling that void, and by the time he gets there, they're gone without a trace. Sometimes they turn up dead a week later. Sometimes they don't turn up at all.   
  
Fisk wants Karen dead, and Matt knows that his threats against Venessa can only protect Karen as long as he's alive to make good on them. All Fisk has to do to kill Karen and avenge his only friend is kill Daredevil first. Another would-be crime boss goes missing, and Matt can't afford to ignore the pattern. While Karen and Foggy investigate, Daredevil goes out to find anyone he can to interrogate. He doesn't come back.   
  
He's not at work Monday morning. He doesn't answer his phone. He hasn't been to his apartment. Karen hasn’t heard from him. Foggy hasn't heard from him.

He's not at work Tuesday morning either. Karen and Foggy drop everything to look for him. They follow the trail of broken-nosed miscreants to the Hudson, and then there's nothing. They double down on their investigation and pull in Jessica and Luke.   
  
It's hopeless. Karen ups the dosage a lot more than she should all at once. It makes her vomit and gives her a migraine. Foggy just thinks she's sick with worry, and he promises Matt will make it out okay. He's not sure Matt's alive.   
  
Karen spends all night waiting at Matt's apartment, pacing. She can't sleep. She tries the full dosage, even though she already took half of it yesterday.   
  
The next morning, Foggy finds her passed out on the floor and calls an ambulance. Luke and Jessica keep looking for Matt, but Foggy stays at the hospital. He can't lose both his friends.   
  
Marci makes sure he keeps eating, Elision takes over a few shifts, and Trish visits with flowers when she hears the news. Foggy reaches out to Karen's dad, figuring maybe he'd want to visit too, or at least know, but the man just sighs and says, "I guess this was inevitable."   
  
"Excuse me?" Foggy is beginning to see why his friend almost never talks about her family.   
  
"Karen never did have any self-control. It was only a matter of time before she overdosed."   
  
Foggy doesn't want to believe it, but he goes back to Matt's apartment and finds the empty needle. He wonders if everyone, everyone else but him, has some dark secret they're always hiding from everyone.


	5. Lucid

In the ambulance, they find the needle marks in her arm and administer naloxone. At the hospital, Foggy doesn’t want to hear about it. They run a CT and take samples for drug tests. When she first opens her eyes, she's not lucid. She pulls her covers over her head, curls into a ball, and whimpers until they sedate her and administer painkillers.

Foggy is still at her bedside when she comes to. "Is he back?" she whispers.

He shakes his head. “No. Jones and Cage are canvassing.” You canvas when you have no real leads.

“Is anyone there?”

“I’m here Karen.”

She reaches up to touch her throat. “Hello?” She speaks louder, more urgently. “Hello?” She reaches out and feels her surroundings: sheets, an IV drip, and Foggy. She lets out a sigh of relief when she recognizes him by his hair. “Foggy.” Her words come out hesitantly. “Is Matt back?” She feels him shake his head no. “How long? How long have I been here?” Too long. She’s been in and out of consciousness. He taps the back of her hand. “Eight hours?” He shakes his head and taps again. “Eight _days?”_ He nods sadly and Karen collapses back onto her pillow.

Eight days and no Matt. “I can’t hear my own voice, Foggy. I can’t see. I can’t even _feel_ right. It’s like my skin is crawling with ants, like when your leg falls asleep. How am I supposed to find him now?” He squeezes her hand and calls a doctor. She may only be worried about Matt, but Foggy is scared for her.

So are the doctors. There's a lot of commotion when Foggy relates her symptoms. Dr. Ellis thinks she’s having a stroke. There are more tests and more doctors, and Foggy gets kicked out into the hallway. They eventually they decide she’s not having a stroke _now_ , but her symptoms were probably caused by one. Dr. Ellis tells Foggy that an air bubble in the needle she injected herself with could have caused a blood clot that traveled to her brain. It was gone by the time she got to the hospital and they ran a CT scan, but it could have cut off circulation for a long time and left lasting damage.

“Lasting? Does lasting mean permanent?”

“It’s a possibility. We’re ordering an MRI to see the extent of it. We can’t communicate with her very well, not unless she happens to know Morse code.”

“She's actually pretty good at Braille.”

“You mean she was blind before? There was no record—”

“No, no, she could see.”

“And hear?”

“It’s her boyfriend who was blind.”

“If we could ask her questions, that would help a lot. I have to warn you, though, that her symptoms are very serious, and she may also have lost the capacity to read, or even understand speech. While it's possible she's lost her hearing, it's more likely that she simply can't comprehend speech anymore.”

“But she was talking to me.”

"And that means we’re optimistic about her memories and personality being intact, at least partially. It's the parts of her brain that process sound and vision that I'm worried about. Things are going to be different now, and it’s going to be hard for both of you, but it’s good that you’re here for her. It’s okay for you to go back in now.”

He settles back into his familiar chair and wipes a tear from Karen’s cheek. He raises her hand to touch his ear and taps her lips with two fingers. _Talk to me._

“Foggy, I’m scared.”


	6. Shut in

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Don't forget to leave a comment!

“It’s unbearable. It’s like when your foot falls asleep, so much it stings to move it, but over my whole body. I’m getting a migraine from all the noise. It’s like dozens of movies are playing all at once. I can’t pick out my own voice. I can’t even hear myself think. When I open my eyes, I just see thousands of lights. They change when you move—they’re you—but all I see are dots of color.”

She goes back to doctor after doctor and gets an MRI that shows her whole brain is lit up like the Fourth of July. They tell her, with the help of Matt’s refreshable Braille display, that it’s sensory overload. She knows. Each signal, from every vibration in her ears, every nerve in her skin, and every rod and cone in her eyes, is shouting at her. Maybe if she’d just taken the right dose, she would have stripped away just enough pre-processing to access fine details in every sense, the way Matt can, or could, but instead she wiped it out completely. She has as much detail as is physically possible and no way to understand it. Explaining it to the doctors is no use. They don’t know how to reverse it, and they don’t even have a pill to suppress it. They tell her to buy noise-cancelling headphones, wear sunglasses, pick less scratchy clothing, and generally just avoid everything.

The autism specialist paints a picture of gradually, over the course of many years, and possibly her whole life, relearning how to process sensory input. The stroke recovery specialist thinks anything’s possible. She may never recover at all. She might gradually improve. She might even regain everything at once, like an amnesiac who recovers all their memories years later after one little trigger. Or she might deteriorate even further. “You really like to cover your bases, huh? Tell me what happens most often.”

“People recover a little for the first few months after the stroke, but they never regain their full capacity. You’re one of the lucky ones. You’re disabled, but you’re still  _ you. _ Your friend says you’re the same as ever, and you still recognize him too, and that’s not something to take for granted.”

Foggy is a saint, but she can't see him or hear him, and somehow it feels even more like being alone when he's there. It's not long before he asks about the needle. "It’s not addictive,” she sighs, “if that’s any comfort." She told the doctors what it was, but they couldn't help. "I did this to myself, Foggy. I swore to my brother," on the day they buried him without her, "that I'd never shoot up again. I deserve this." She doesn't really want to explain what she was trying to do. Foggy's already mad enough at Matt, and she doesn’t want to give him something else to blame on him. She just wants Matt back.

When Foggy takes her home from the hospital, she turns off all the lights in her apartment, shuts the blinds, and curls up with a bottle of aspirin. She can only stay awake for a couple hours at a time before succumbing to crushing migraines, and she can't sleep without sedatives. She wants to find Matt, but she can barely even function. Maybe if she’d just taken the right dose… but she doesn’t know if she could live with herself right now, knowing she might never see Matt again, if she hadn’t tried everything.

Even having done everything in her power, she's not sure how she can go on. When she's not asleep, she's crying about Matt, worrying about what's going to happen to her, and trying desperately to squeeze the searing pain out of her skull. Every day is another day he doesn't walk in the door and make everything better. Every day is another day she feels like her brain's been sautéed with onions and red peppers. Every day is one more day closer to learning to live like this.

She wishes they hadn’t told her she might improve. She’s learning to rely a lot more in touch, and her sense of smell is unmistakably stronger, so maybe it's actually working there, but it's not ideal in New York City. Her world is on fire, but not like Matt's. It’s more of a dumpster fire than a superpower.

Her first week out of the hospital passes, and she has to get up eventually. She has to go buy groceries, or get out of the apartment, or do anything at all, but her head hurts, so she curls up again and tosses and turns until she falls asleep.

Foggy wakes her up to give her a Greek salad and get her signatures on Social Security disability benefits paperwork. “Eat up,” he types. She nods and pokes at her food with a fork. “I brought you some books. You’re getting really good at Braille.”

“Thanks Foggy.” She takes a few bites of salad and pauses. “Do you smell that?”

"No?"   


"Never mind. My head feels better." The pain always comes back when she's awake long enough, but she actually feels a bit different this time. "I'll take a shower and maybe practice reading a bit." No response. "You there still? I'll sign those papers before you go. Foggy?" She reaches out and feels nothing.  _ "Foggy?” _ Her heart beats faster and her hair stands on end. She can't see or hear what's going on, but instincts are telling her she's not alone. She smells blood.


	7. Chapter 7

Karen strains to listen, but only hears noise. She opens her eyes wide and only sees chaos, but it barely matters. She knows, completely by instinct, that there’s someone in the room with her, someone lethal. She knows he’s coming closer. She knows she's going to be okay, but she decides it's probably best not to count on that. She backs up to her headboard and grabs her bag from the bedside table, ready to pull out her pepper spray or her gun, whichever she finds first. The gun. A hand grabs her wrist and and she tries to throw a punch with her other arm. Even before she misses, she can feel the air pulling away as her target ducks, leans into her, and lifts her over his shoulder in one motion. She shoves her feet hard against the wall as she rises and knocks him back onto her bed, landing on top of him and scrambling over him to get away, shoving a knee in his nose on the way off.

Another hand grabs her shoulder and she screams, but it’s just Foggy. He always taps twice with his thumb to let her know. She lets him stop her and turn her back around. The man comes closer, and it’s terrifying how disarming he is. She wants to let down all her defenses and step forward like a moth to flame. She suppresses the instinct and moves back.

He steps forward again. “Karen…”

Her name cuts through the noise with perfect clarity. He smells like blood, sweat, and mold, but his voice is unmistakable. "Matt." Karen still can't hear her own voice. She hesitates a moment. Her intuition is still telling her he's dangerous. When they met, he was hiding behind a cane, shades, a suit, and a gentle voice, but fear and adrenaline are showing her a different side of him. She buries her face in his shoulder and wraps him in her arms, and she can feel it now in the balance of his stance, the tension in his muscles, and the slow, powerful rhythm of his heart. She could smell it even before he entered the room. "You scared me."

His chest vibrates as he speaks. She can't hear him, but she can guess. "I couldn't see you. Say my name again."

“Karen,” he obliges. “Karen, Karen, Karen.” He goes on talking, but that's all she can recognize.

“I—I should have trusted you to come back," she interrupts. "I should have waited. I tried, but you were gone so long, and I was terrified that I would never see you again. And now…” He’s in her arms, and she can’t see anything. “I did something reckless.” He speaks again, and she can’t stand not knowing what he's saying. “I—I can’t hear you. I can’t hear. I can’t see anymore.” The lump in her throat chokes out her words and she motions at Foggy to take over.

Foggy is dealing with some mixed emotions. He knows from past experience that Matt can dodge a stapler, but he had to throw something, and it turns out his friend is completely defenseless against tossed salad. While Karen was reaching for her gun, Foggy was waving the hospital paperwork and shouting, "YOU NEARLY KILLED HER." Matt moved past him to stop her from drawing a weapon, and Foggy was too late to explain, "You can't just grab her. She can't see y—ouch! That's gotta hurt." He feels Matt earned his bloody nose and more, and that he has a lot to answer for. More importantly, though, Matt is alive to do the answering, and on top of that, Karen recognizes him. She said, "Say my name again," which means she heard him. She stepped back when he got close, like she could tell he was there. Maybe it's starting to come back a little. This is the first glimmer of hope he's seen for recovery.

"While you were off saving the world, Karen had a very serious stroke. She was in the hospital for two weeks."

Karen feels Matt’s grip tighten. “But she’s…” She’s so young. He knows it's not impossible, but why does she have to be the exception?

“It took her vision, she can’t hear anymore—except maybe her name now?—and she’s experiencing constant sensory overload, which makes it hard to sleep and gives her migraines when she's awake more than a few hours. She’s lucky to be alive right now."

“Is this some kind of practical joke?" The scary thing is that he can already hear that it isn't.

"No, Matthew, it's not a joke. She might never recover."

"She, she was so healthy." Her heartbeat always sounded perfect.

Foggy bites his tongue and nods slowly. There's more. “There was a needle.”

“Someone did this to her?”

“Easy, Matt. She can feel you.” He paces and runs his hands through his hair. “You were gone. She got clean a long time ago, but this… this was too much. It was her needle.”

“No.” Matt doesn’t know why Foggy would lie, or even how he could lie, but he can’t just accept it. He sits down, and Karen follows. She wraps an arm over his shoulders, leans her head against his to feel it move, and rests a hand on his heart. He puts his own hand over hers and holds tight. She's right here with him, but she can't hear his conversation or see his reaction. “It, it doesn’t make sense. What kind of drug does this to you?” It sounds more like poison than anything else. “Why would that even exist, and why would she… why would Karen…” She told him a long time ago about her history of substance abuse. She said she swore it off.

“The doctors think it was probably an air bubble in the needle.”

“No." That's nonsense. "You don’t just forget how to shoot up.” She wouldn’t make that kind of mistake, and she wouldn’t overdose on accident, and even if she did, it wouldn't look like this. Matt’s known the very worst of New York City, and he’s never come across anything that messes you up like this.

Foggy doesn’t know what else to say. He hands Matt the Braille display, but Matt sets it aside. He lifts Karen to her feet and stands, holding her hand. “Karen?" He's asking for some kind of explanation.

She bows her head and nods in resignation. Matt needs to know, and she needs to get this out before she can't anymore. "I thought I had a chance to find you, and I took it. I guess I just… overdosed." She takes him to her dresser and pulls a notebook from the top drawer. He notices the smell of rodents on it, and something else, a faint chemical odor he knows he’s smelled before but can’t quite place. "I was so careful about taking notes, and now I can’t read them.” 

Foggy takes the log and flips through it. "Subject M1 unaffected… R10 dead… That's a lot of dead rats. Karen?”

“Even before he went missing, I always worried something would happen to Matt.”

“Me too, but I never took it out on the vermin.”

Matt's beginning to realize why he recognizes the scent of the notebook. “You, you couldn’t possibly think that was safe.”

“Think what was safe?” Foggy asks, handing Matt the Braille display again. “She can’t hear you, remember?”

“I didn’t know what I’d do,” Karen continues while Foggy's still talking. “But then I realized you weren’t born with abilities any more than I was."

“Abilities?” Matt steps back and drops Karen's hand. "You could have died." He takes an empty glass off the dresser and smashes it against the far wall, grateful she can't hear and be frightened by his anger. “No. No. You don't, you don't choose this." His yearbook named him "most articulate" and his practice testifies to his rhetorical prowess, but he can't even begin to explain how wrong what she did was. It's not that he doesn't have the words; it's that he can't say them. She's exposed his most cherished lie for what it is. No matter how much he tells himself his senses are a gift, he wouldn't wish them on anyone. For everyone he saves, there are so many others he has to ignore. She's lucky it didn't work.

“Matt! Not okay!" Foggy thought he felt Karen flinch. "Do you want the neighbors calling in a domestic disturbance? You would have done exactly the same thing in her position, and you know it.”

“I should have listened to Stick. I should never have gotten this close. She could have died, and for what? I could have been dead already, and even if I wasn't, it was only a matter of time before I got myself killed."

"Then maybe she actually saved you after all." He got himself back here, but Foggy means more than that.

Matt’s breath catches as it all sinks in. He needs to be there for Karen, no matter what happens and no matter how long it lasts. That means he needs to be alive. He could equivocate all day and night, and he could try to justify some middle ground, but he knows what's right. He's not going to visit justice upon his captors. He's not going to track down whoever put a price on his head. He's going to put his nightlife behind him, go home, get cleaned up, put on a suit, and get to work. “That’s it, then," he says resolutely. "That's the end of Daredevil.” Maybe that means he can marry her. Maybe they can have a family. His posture relaxes and his heartbeat settles peacefully. "It's over. You pick the cases from now on, Foggy. The firm needs to offer better health insurance."

"Good news and bad news. Nelson, Murdock, & Page actually already has top-of-the-line benefits, including both health and disability coverage. It was the first thing Karen changed after you told her your secret, which just goes to show that she's smarter than Matthew 'don't need no hospital' Murdock and Franklin 'didn't even think of it' Nelson combined. The bad news is that we're gonna have to change our sign again to say "Page, Nelson, and Murdock," and the other bad news is that I signed a retainer to cover the deductibles up to the out-of-pocket maximum. We're repping a small stock brokerage for the year. If I had my way, it'd be a big brokerage, but we've gotta start somewhere."

A siren sounds in the distance, and Matt clenches his fists again, but he forces them back open. "Whatever it takes."

Karen stares silently at the shards of glass on the floor. Matt's broken image bounces off the surfaces, and his voice follows close behind, carrying the curvature of the glass with it. The sirens stop and gunfire breaks out, but he holds his composure, and she realizes it's not the first time. Crime doesn't only happen at night, and if he dropped everything whenever someone needed help, he'd be completely nonfunctional as a lawyer.

She taps Foggy on the shoulder, and his eyes get real big real fast when he realizes she's making eye contact again. "What is it?" Matt asks.

"It's nothing," Karen smirks.


End file.
